Whether caused by improvements in the economy or improvements in their work-life isn’t clear, but nurses in 2012 are more willing than just a year ago to stay in the profession and continue working right where they are.
The 2012 Survey of Registered Nurses found 91 percent of responding nurses satisfied with nursing as a career and almost three-quarters of them (73 percent) said they were satisfied with their current job. That job and career satisfaction — the highest in the three years of the survey — may explain why 66 percent of the nurses intend to “continue working as I am.”
As the survey report itself says, “The 2012 survey results show a much improved sense of satisfaction with both career and job.”
Last year, only 74 percent of the nurses in the survey said they were satisfied with their choice of profession and only 55 percent of the nurses said they intended to “continue working as I am”; 24 percent planned to look for another job. In the 2012 survey, the percentage of nurses intending to change employers dropped to 17 percent. keep reading…
Here’s a riddle for everyone looking to make a hire or get a date for Saturday night: How is Sadie Hawkins Day like recruiting?
Give up? Really?? This is an easy one! Both of you get to court the object of your desire.
Sadie Hawkins Day is “celebrated” on the first Saturday after November 9, which of course, is tomorrow. According to tradition — a tradition that evolved from a comic strip back in 1937 — Sadie Hawkins is the day when girls could ask boys out on a date and they pretty much had to accept. Back in pre-war America, that sort of thing just didn’t happen. But it caught on fast, after cartoonist Al Capp inked the first Sadie Hawkins Day race in his L’il Abner strip.
keep reading…
What do employees want? Joel Spolsky says that what they most want is to grow, to learn. Robert Half once showed that what they want is a stable job, and what would cause them to leave their jobs is better pay and benefits.
The latest such query comes from Hogan Assessments, which asked 941 people, “”What do you consider most important in a job? Rank your priorities from 1 to 10, with one being most important.”
The priorities they could choose from: benefits; interesting/meaningful work; office hours/location; opportunity for advancement; relationships; responsibility/control of own work; salary; job security; training, learning, and development; working conditions.
This time around, at least, interesting/meaningful work was the big winner — as the graphic shows.
Corporate recruiting is a field where there are distinct and measurable differences between the average and elite functions. In short, what that means is that “elite” recruiting functions (defined as the top 1%) produce superior results and act in ways that are totally different from the average function.
I am frequently asked during corporate presentations to cite the difference between “good and great” recruiting functions. Well, as a former chief talent officer and someone who has spent years devoted to identifying what makes the handful of elite recruiting functions unique, I’ve come up with an assessment tool. It is a checklist that can be used by recruiting leaders as a self-assessment tool in order to determine how they compare “side-by-side” to the few firms that have reached this elite status. The 40 defining characteristics are broken into seven distinct categories and they are listed in a numbered format for easy scanning.
The 40 Defining Characteristics of an “Elite Recruiting Function” in 2012 keep reading…
You might remember that post back in April with interesting data about job-hoppers. Dan Enthoven argued that there is “zero correlation between the number of positions employees have had in the recent past and how long they’ll last on their next job. A candidate who’s had five jobs in five years is no more likely to quit than someone who’s had one job for five years.”
Apparently, employers aren’t yet convinced, says a new survey from Bullhorn.
The recruiting-software company’s survey of 1,500 hiring managers and recruiters (in-house but mainly agency recruiters) shows that 39 percent of recruiters say “the single biggest obstacle for an unemployed candidate in regaining employment is having a history of ‘hopping jobs,’ or leaving a company before one year of tenure.”
Fewer — 31 percent — say that being out of work for more than a year is the greatest challenge. Gaps in employment history came in third at 28 percent.
One variable is how long you’ve been unemployed. keep reading…
The Hilton in Istanbul
In part 1 of this article, I highlighted my top 10 recently implemented bold and outrageous practices in HR and talent management.
The goal is not to recommend these practices, but instead to more clearly define the leading edge of current practice.
In this part 2, I will highlight 13 additional practices that define the leading and “bleeding edge” of HR. If your goal is to “push the envelope” in talent management, this list can give you an idea of where the average ends and the truly bold practices begin.
Although every firm cannot directly adopt the practices listed here (some are reprehensible), I find during my corporate presentations that merely becoming aware of these bleeding-edge practices can create great energy and a strong desire for individual HR functions to do more and be bolder.
Additional “Bold and Outrageous” HR and Talent Management Practices
Here are my selections for the remaining top recently implemented bold approaches that define the bleeding edge of HR practices. keep reading…
Think you don’t need an employer branding strategy? Read on about a few numbers.
Because it is difficult to focus on implementing several practices all at once, you may wish to use this checklist to put items in order of importance or urgency as you begin to plan your employer-of-choice strategy.
To Match Candidates’ Expectations With Work Realities
- Conduct realistic job previews with every job candidate.
- Hire from the pool of temp, adjunct staff, interns, and part-time workers.
- Hire candidates referred by current employees.
- Create a realistic job description with a short list of the most critical competencies.
- Allow team members to interview candidates.
- Hire from the pool of current employees.
- Create a way for candidates to “sample” the work experience.
- Survey or interview new hires to find out how to minimize new-hire surprises in the future.
To Match the Person to the Job keep reading…
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure; Married in haste, we may repent at leisure. –William Congreve, 1693
If you work from a job description only to find it does not correctly define candidate requirements; if you send multiple candidates to the hiring manager only to him/her complain about wrong-skilled people; if turnover stubbornly stays high; if too many people fail training programs; if newly promoted managers fail on the job; if 80% of salespeople produce only 20% of sales, or if half the people you hire tend to sink to the bottom of the pool, then William Congreve defined your problem over 300 years ago.
Put another way, any organization that uses poor or inaccurate hiring processes is doomed to suffer the long-term consequences of poor employee and manager performance.
Cost
What would you do with a department whose decisions resulted in a 10-50% annual defect rate? That’s the estimated cost of turnover; job mistakes; too many people doing too little work; quality defects; poor customer service; barely acceptable productivity; low sales; and, so forth that came from using typical hiring practices.
While you pray your line managers aren’t reading this article, consider the following. keep reading…
As Amazon prepares to open two, massive warehouse facilities in the next six months or so, the company took the unprecedented step of announcing a new employee benefit on its homepage.
In a letter addressed to “customers,” CEO Jeff Bezos said Amazon would now pay up to $8,000 toward tuition and expenses for full-time hourly workers who want to learn a new trade. “For people who’ve been with us as little as three years, we’re offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields,” says Bezos.
What’s particularly unusual about the Amazon program is that only education leading to a well-paying, high-demand job will be funded. It doesn’t matter, says Bezos, if the training is relevant to a career with Amazon. keep reading…
It’s what Joel Spolsky, an expert on hiring for technology jobs in particular, says is what employees most care about.
Google’s trying it, but other, smaller, companies are too, he says — and there are lots of ways to accomplish it.
He spells it out below, in this clip from the most recent ERE Expo, in San Diego. About 3 1/2 minutes.
keep reading…
According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.
This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.
In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.
And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. keep reading…
I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and to sell them on the company and the job. Taken together, this identification, assessment and selling feature make referrals superior to any other source.
If your corporation is not getting close to 50% of your hires from employee referrals, I have gathered 10 compelling numbers that should change your perspective. keep reading…
In this dynamic, provocative and groundbreaking presentation, you will learn to see the science of employee engagement in a completely new way. You will understand why the way we have historically measured employee engagement is fundamentally flawed. You will discover that many of the ways we have been working to drive employee engagement may be actually hurting the company’s performance. And, most importantly, you’ll learn what to do about it. You will be introduced to the concept of Reality-Based Engagement where accountability and engagement intersect to produce awesome results. This will include some practical guidance for how to cultivate the power of personal accountability within your organization.
For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on HR be sure to check out TLNT!
Careers today aren’t what they used to be. After serving in the Army and attending college, my father started his career in the early 1960s as a high school English teacher and head coach of the football team. After a few years he decided he needed to make more money, moving his young family to Florida to join Pan American Airlines as a college campus recruiter. His third — and last — job started two years later with a move to Xerox. After 34 years as an HR executive he retired from Xerox in 1999, concluding a four-job, 40-year career. And it’s a work history you likely won’t see ever again.
My father’s “Mad Men” generation did in fact average four jobs/employers in their career. But if you are in your twenties working today, you can expect to hold 10 jobs before you retire. If you also work in California in the tech sector, you can expect to hold 14. One reason is this: keep reading…
Employers of hourly labor in industries including fast-food dining, retail, and contact centers often struggle with high turnover, and the associated costs of constantly hiring and training new employees. A common screening technique used by recruiters is to weed out “job hoppers” — those candidates who have held many short-term jobs. But a recent study by Evolv’s analytics team found that work history is a poor predictor of future job tenure.
The study analyzed applicant data and employment outcomes from more than 21,000 call center agents drawn from five major contact centers to determine the relationship between previous work experience and future employment outcomes. The results show zero correlation between the number of positions employees have had in the recent past and how long they’ll last on their next job. A candidate who’s had five jobs in five years is no more likely to quit than someone who’s had one job for five years. In addition, the study reports people who are unemployed when they apply for a job also have the same expected tenure as any other candidate.
Job-hoppers and the “Perpetually Unemployed” keep reading…
Or why HR metrics need to focus on helping managers to improve their people management decision-making
For at least the last decade, HR departments around the world have been pouring tons of time and money into developing HR metrics. Unfortunately, that effort has largely led to continued levels of frustration and, at best, a large number of what I call “so-what” metrics with little strategic impact. It doesn’t matter whether your HR metrics were provided as part of the software that you purchased or if they came from a major HR consulting firm; the results have been the same: dismal at best. After three plus decades of thought leadership and research in HR metrics, I’ve concluded that the current approach is an abject failure and that HR simply can’t continue on this current painful path.
The time has come to completely disregard today’s approach and to look to other functions that have had significantly better luck influencing executives with their metrics (i.e. customer service, supply chain, branding, and finance, to name a few). Even if you are currently happy with your metrics, this article should provide you with sufficient reasons as to why you should rethink your approach and to shift toward what I call “people management decision-making metrics,” a far superior approach that focuses on helping managers improve their people-management decision-making.
The Top 20 Major Faults With Most HR Metric Approaches keep reading…
In part 1 of this article I highlighted the many reasons why prioritizing positions, employees, and business units was necessary, and how it could dramatically increase business results. In the following sections, I will highlight the methodology and steps that HR leaders need to take in order to prioritize HR’s customers and programs. keep reading…
Why HR Must Prioritize Its Internal Customers
Prioritization is one of the highest-ROI practices available to HR leaders, but unfortunately most in HR have failed to take advantage of it. It takes very little time or money to prioritize your internal customers, but the results can be dramatic. keep reading…
the Zynga Ztrium
Here is a heads-up alert for you: be prepared because not only will the infamous “War For Talent” be returning to impact your firm, but it is already underway in its full intensity here in the Silicon Valley. Begin planning for this next round of talent wars, because once the intense competition begins, there simply won’t be time to catch up with, no less get ahead of your talent competition. If you’re not familiar with the “war for talent” phenomena, it involves a prolonged period of intense competition where top applicants are both scarce and arrogant, employees leave by the droves, firms regularly raid each other for talent, and bidding for top talent is commonplace. keep reading…
Whether caused by improvements in the economy or improvements in their work-life isn’t clear, but nurses in 2012 are more willing than just a year ago to stay in the profession and continue working right where they are.
